Developing Organizational Relationships

Last week I spoke about connecting with audience, creating a dynamic website and blogging.  Today’s tip is how to create relationships between your film and organizations that should be interested in it. This is an especially useful strategy for documentaries that naturally have a wide range of potential issue-oriented sites with which to connect. But with a little outside-the-box thinking you can probably find relevant sites for your narrative film as well.

Ways to create a relationship with other sites/organizations:

1. Blog about their sites and link to them.
2. Request that they link back to you.
3. Send them your film and ask them to blog about the film and/or review it. (This also helps your search engine rankings — search engines will improve the rankings of sites that other sites not only link to but also write about.)
4. Go one step further: Create an affiliate relationship with those sites or organizations.
5. Use this relationship to generate community screenings.

My workshops start this week in London and next week in Amsterdam.  Check out the TOTBO site for more information.  Sign up for London HERE.   Comment here or on my blog, or @Jon_Reiss on twitter, or on the TOTBO Facebook page.  Check out the book here.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Engage Organizations to Promote Your Film

Audience Engagement: Know WHERE your audience derives information/congregates.

Many niche’s have organizations that support those specific topics and interests.  Engage those organizations early in your filmmaking process (as early as conception and prep). It is important to have the proper attitude toward your audience and these organizations. You need to think, “What can I give them?” instead of “What can they do for me?” If you think of the former, the latter will flow. People are very busy. You need to give them an incentive to be involved with you. The film is not enough. How will the film service their organization, their lives and the lives of their members?  In turn, they will help you promote your film to your direct audience.   This has been used by great effect by documentary filmmakers.  Narrative filmmakers need to follow their lead.

Paramount Pictures decided that it would not sneak preview their blockbuster film GI Joe  The Rise of Cobra for traditional media critics and instead embarked on a more grassroots approach to marketing the film. Box office numbers will tell how successful their marketing campaign has been. Their ROI needs to be high since they have cited a production cost of $180 million. The fact that a big studio is recognizing the value of gathering an audience from a film’s inception instead of throwing money at a large media campaign just before the film is released only serves to prove my point that forming a marketing strategy and implementing it in stages as production gets underway is the best way to go. This method would work wonders with an indie production with much less than $180 mil on the line. 

Through research, Paramount identified their target audience as being blue collar workers in small markets, especially those from a military background. Paramount Vice Chairman Rob Moore said “Our starting point for this movie is not Hollywood and Manhattan but rather middle America. The group of people we think are going to respond to the movie  are not normally the first priority, but we’re making them a priority.” The film’s U.S. premiere was held at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland instead of in a Hollywood theater. Hundreds of soldiers and their families joined director Stephen Sommers, stars Channing Tatum, Sienna Miller and Marlon Wayans on the red carpet.

Paramount reached out to GI Joe fan community leaders to garner their support early in the project. They attended fan conventions and asked what the communities would like to see in the film. Unfortunately, they did not carry through with the communication once production was underway, leaving the fans to mistrust the final outcome. I think they blew their chance to have free PR on those sites and I would not recommend indie films to follow their actions. Keep the fans engaged at every step in the process, let them feel included and they will support you through to the end.

Paramount also used some unconventional venues to advertise the film such as running trailers at  Kid Rock/Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts early in the summer, running a 90 second spot during the Country Music Television Awards and advertising in regional and national military newspapers and magazines. Clearly, they knew who their audience was and where to find them. Only days before the US release did they expand to TV, radio and newspaper ads. The weekend’s box office will tell if they are on target for the $40 million opening they predicted, but I think we are seeing the future of film marketing for big studios as well as independent films.

PS. Box office results hit on Monday with Paramount raking in over $56 million, well above their $40 million target. Seems like this grassroots approach has paid off for them.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6ejPG-i03I[/youtube]

A week or so back I invited you to view and vote for animator Joaquin Baldwin’s wonderful film Sebastian’s Voodoo to win at the Cannes Short Film Corner online competition. I am happy to report that the film won this category by over 2,100 votes. Congrats Joaquin!

Ah the power of the internet. All voting was conducted online for this competition so it was necessary to drive as much traffic to the online voting site as possible and encourage people to not only view the film, but vote for it. Joaquin started with contacting all of his friends on Facebook and MySpace and telling them about the competition. When he contacted me, of course I said yes. We then created a separate page on Facebook so that he could contact all fans with one post instead of having to contact everyone individually. He notified all of his friends (who in turn notified theirs) to join the page and posted status daily on how the voting was going. I also encouraged him to Tweet daily to all of his followers on the state of the voting and encourage them to vote and join his Facebook fan page.

Next I contacted our friend Chris Jones, guerilla filmmaker extraordinare, to mention us in his blog which is widely read in the independent film community. Luckily he obliged because he had seen Joaquin’s work at a festival he attended and loved it. I think we received some solid votes from that effort. Joaquin was interviewed by an online publication in Paraguay and received featured posts at BoingBoing, Dailymotion.com and Crackle.com. Of course, we both sent out blanket emails to all of our mailing list telling everyone to go to the site and vote.

This campaign was kept up for a week and a half with constant attention and people wrote back either on personal email or on the wall of his Facebook page giving us positive feedback and encouraging others to vote. This kind of grassroots effort is what it takes to sell DVD’s too people!

We are now investigating the best ways to leverage this win for his future projects. It is always important to follow up any win or positive review for your film by letting as many people, publications and organizations know. This expands your reach and gives legitimacy to your success in order to foster positive relationships with your fan base where they can share in your success.